The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
Volume 27
Issue 1 March
Article 4
March 2000
The Missing Safety Net and Families: A Progressive
Critique of the New Welfare Legislation
Eitzen
Maxine Baca Zinn
Michigan State University
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Eitzen and Zinn, Maxine Baca (2000) "The Missing Safety Net and Families: A Progressive Critique of the New Welfare Legislation,"
The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: Vol. 27: Iss. 1, Article 4.
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The Missing Safety Net and Families:
A Progressive Critique of the
New Welfare Legislation
D. STANLEY EITZEN
Colorado State University
Department of Sociology
MAXINE BACA ZINN
Michigan State University
Department of Sociology
This is an overview essay on the 1996 welfare legislation and its con-
sequences. The paper is divided into five parts: (1) The basic elements
of the legislation; (2) The conservative assumptions undergirding this
legislation and the progressive responses to them; (3) The consequences
of the legislationfor individualsand families; (4) The missing elements in
the new welfare legislation;and (5) The progressivesolution to welfare.
From 1935 to 1996 the United States had a minimal welfare
program for those in need. Since the Reagan administration this
welfare program has gradually been dismantled. This dismemberment accelerated in 1996 when the federal government made
welfare assistance to families temporary and withdrew $55 billion
of federal aid to poor people. Thus, the federal safety net under
the poor has been shredded especially for poor families with
children (Schorr, 1997:163). This is an overview essay, drawing together the current information on the general and family-specific
consequences resulting from the recent welfare legislation. It is
divided into five parts: (1) the basic elements of the 1996 welfare
legislation; (2) the conservative assumptions guiding that legislation and the progressive response; (3) the consequences of the
legislation for individuals and families; (4) the missing elements
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, March, 2000, Volume XXVII, Number 1
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in the new welfare legislation; and (5) the progressive solution to
welfare.
THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND
WORK OPPORTUNITY ACT OF 1996
The welfare system prior to 1996 needed an overhaul. Its provisions encouraged dependency since recipients leaving welfare
lost medicaid. It provided disincentives to work because money
earned was subtracted from welfare payments. By leaving the
distribution of benefits for many programs to the states, there
were wide disparities in benefits by geographical location. And,
the benefits provided were never enough to lift people out of
poverty. The welfare system, however, did help many on the
economic margins to get above the poverty line. A study by the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that
without such assistance, 57.6 million people would have been poor
in 1995. "But when government benefits are counted, including
food stamps, housing assistance, school lunch support and benefits
provided through the earned-income tax credit, the number of poor
people drops to 30.3 million" (emphasis added). (Reported in Herbert,
1996: 68A)
While this difference is certainly meaningful, the government
could do much better. For example, France and the United States
both would have child poverty rates of about 25 percent if it were
not for government assistance. With the generous government
assistance provided in France, the child poverty rate is reduced
to just 6.5 percent. The minimal U. S. welfare program, on the
other hand, reduces the child poverty rate to about 21 percent
(Raspberry, 1997).
In 1996 the Republican-dominated Congress and a middleof-the-road Democratic president passed a sweeping welfare law
that ended the 61-year old safety net for poor people, completing the
Reagan Revolution (Watts, 1997: 409; Sciacchitano, 1999). The major provisions of this law (as later amended) include the following (much of the description of the new welfare law and
its consequences are from the Children's Defense Fund, 1997:
Edelman, 1997; Schorr, 1997; Watts, 1997; and Eitzen, 1996): First,
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55
the law eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC), setting up a temporary program in its place. Second,
states, through federal block grants, were given a fixed sum of
money and considerable flexibility in how to spend it. Third, the
law insisted on work. States were required to demand that parents
work within two years of receiving cash assistance, although
states had the right to shorten the period before recipients must
work. Fourth, the law mandated a five-year lifetime limit on the
receipt of assistance, which states can reduce if they wish. Fifth,
the law required that unmarried teen parents must live with
an adult and attend school to receive assistance. Sixth, various
federal assistance programs targeted for the poor were cut by
$54.5 billion over six years. Included in these budget cuts were
$27 billion from the food stamp program, $7 billion from the
children's portion of the Supplemental Security Income program,
and $3 billion over six years for child nutrition, and federal
funding for social services was cut by a six-year total of $2.5
billion. Cuts were also made by tightening the qualifying criteria
for being defined as a disabled child. Ironically, the narrowed
eligibility requirements "result in the loss of coverage for some
children who if they were adults would be considered disabled"
(Edelman, 1997: 48). Seventh, the welfare law denied a broad
range of public benefits to legal immigrants. Concerning this last
point, although there is some variation from state to state (since
the states administer the programs), all legal immigrants were
cut off from food stamps and those who entered the country after
the welfare bill was signed were ineligible for federal programs
such as Supplemental Security Income and state run programs
such as temporary welfare and Medicaid. And, eighth, the federal
money given to the states was capped at $16.4 billion annually.
This is significant because it means that there is no adjustment for
inflation or population growth. In effect, by 2002 states will have
considerably less federal money to spend on welfare than they
did under the old welfare provisions.
In sum, this new welfare legislation ended the entitlement
which guaranteed that states must give help to all needy families
with children (Quadagno, 1999). Now assistance for poor families
was temporary with parents required to work. Lamenting the
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Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
passage of the 1996 Welfare Act, The Nation editorialized: "There
is now a bipartisan agreement that the United States bears no
responsibility for its poorest families" (The Nation, 1995: 371).
THE CONSERVATIVE ASSUMPTIONS GUIDING CURRENT
WELFARE POLICY AND THE PROGRESSIVE RESPONSE
Assumptions from conservative ideology provide the bedrock of the 1996 Welfare Law (Sciacchitano, 1999). First, there
is the conservative assumption that welfare programs establish
perverse incentives that keep the beneficiaries from working and
to have babies outside of marriage. That is, welfare is so generous
that it makes sense to stay on welfare, rather than go to work.
Moreover, since the benefits increase with each child, women
on welfare make the rational decision to have more children.
Progressives argue that this reasoning is fallacious because it
ignores five facts: (1) The average monthly AFDC payment, accounting for inflation, has withered by almost 50 percent since
1970, yet the birth rate for unmarried mothers has soared during
this period; (2) The average monthly AFDC payment plus food
stamps provides benefits that are much below the poverty line;
(3) States with low welfare benefits have higher illegitimacy rates
than states with higher welfare benefits; (4) New Jersey's 1993
law that ended the practice of increasing a welfare check when a
recipient had another baby did not drive down birth rates among
women on welfare (Healy, 1997); and (5) The much more generous
welfare states of Canada, western Europe, and Scandinavia have
much lower out-of-wedlock birth rates than found in the United
States.
A second assumption of the lawmakers is that when poor
people are confronted with a "sink or swim" world they will
develop the determination and the skill to stay afloat (Murray,
1984). By shoving welfare recipients off of the dole, their only
recourse will be to work, resulting in productive rather than
parasitic people. Progressives, however, note that under current
societal conditions many of the poor will "sink" even if they
wanted to "swim." There are not enough jobs and many of the
jobs that are available do not lift poor people out of poverty.
And, many who are being pushed "into the pool" cannot"swim"
because they lack the skills and experience required.
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57
Third, there is a moral condemnation of those on welfare
because their poverty is assumed by conservatives the result of
their attitude, their way of life, and their choice to reject the work
ethic. Progressives argue, to the contrary, that the problem for
most welfare recipients is not the lack of a work ethic but a lack
of jobs that pay enough to enable them to become independent
(Handler and Hasenfeld, 1997:12; for empirical invalidation of the
culture of poverty argument of the conservatives see, for example,
Edin and Lein, 1997). Moreover, they see a tendency on the part
of the conservatives to reserve this moral condemnation of poor
people "for those who are not only poor but different-in terms
of race, ethnicity, country of origin, or religion-or who violate
patriarchal norms" (Handler and Hasenfeld, 1997: 9).
Progressives argue that the willingness to work on the part
of poor people is not the problem. Research from a number of
studies shows that most welfare recipients do work, bringing in
extra money from various activities such as house cleaning, doing
laundry, repairing clothing, child care, and selling items that they
have made. For example, sociologist Kathleen Harris, summarizing her findings from a nationally representative sample of single
mothers who received welfare, says:
I found exclusive dependence on welfare to be rare. More than half
of the single mothers whom I studied worked while they were
on welfare, and two-thirds left the welfare rolls when they could
support themselves with jobs. However, more than half (57 percent)
of the women who worked their way off public assistance later
returned because their jobs ended or they still could not make ends
meet. (Harris, 1996: B7)
This outside work to supplement welfare is necessary because
welfare payments are insufficient to make ends meet. In 1991, for
example, the average AFDC payment and food stamps averaged
$565 a month, while the average monthly expenses were $876a deficit of $311 (Koretz, 1996). In Mississippi, for example, the
benefits for years have been only 17 percent of the poverty live and
with food stamps added, only 40 percent of the poverty line (Edelman, 1999). This difference is made up through various strategies
including income-producing work and help from family, friends,
neighbors, boyfriends, and absent fathers.
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Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
A question arising from the requirement that all welfare recipients work is whether a single mother is "able" to work (McLarin,
1995). Traditionally, she was not considered so. AFDC was created in 1935 with the goal of keeping women at home with
their children. The new legislation has changed that, forcing
poor women with children to work, often without the training,
sometimes without the jobs, and usually without the child care.
Through twisted logic, many of the same politicians who want
poor mothers to work, want middle-class mothers to give up their
jobs because a stay-at-home mother is positive for children.
Another issue regarding work has to do with its availability.
During the Great Depression the federal government provided
jobs for poor people. These jobs included the construction of
roads, bridges, and buildings, clearing forests, planting trees to
stop wind erosion, and the like. The jobs provided society with
important projects and needy individuals and families with income and skill development. The situation is different now. The
new legislation mandates that poor people will work but without
providing the jobs.
This punitive overhaul [of the welfare system] sends [welfare recipients] off on their own to secure work in a world of downsizing,
layoffs and capital flight. Where are the welfare recipients going to
find stable jobs? How can they pay for health insurance and child
care when they earn the minimum wage? What will happen to their
children? (The Nation, 1995: 372)
Fourth, welfare dependency is assumed by conservatives to
be the source of illegitimacy, laziness, crime, and other social
pathologies. Progressives, however, point to the nations with a
much more generous welfare system than in the United States,
noting that cities in those countries are much safer, and that
violent crime is very much lower than in the United States, as
is the rate of teenage pregnancy. Also, from 1970 to the mid1990s AFDC benefits declined sharply (from $792 per month in
inflation-adjusted 1994 dollars in 1970 for a family of four to
$435 per month in 1994. If welfare benefits affect marriage and
fertility, then one would expect that the drop in welfare benefits
would have made marriage more attractive and childbearing
outside of marriage less attractive. "Yet divorce, cohabitation,
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59
and the percentage of births that occurred outside of marriage
all increased during this period" (Cherlin, 1998: 124).
Most important, progressives argue that when welfare is seen
as the cause of societal ills, the remedy is to get rid of welfare rather
than confronting the structural sources of poverty. The causes
of poverty are complex, involving the structural inequalities of
class, race, and gender, the changing economy, the lack of good
jobs, the maldistribution of resources for schools, and inadequate
pay and benefits for low-end jobs. All of these conditions occur
within the ideology and practice of capitalism, which celebrates
competition, selfishness, domination, and exploitation. Thus, a
cure for poverty involves much more than greater individual
effort and getting rid of the welfare system. It requires structural
changes in society.
Finally, there is a racial subtext in the welfare legislation. Underlying the debate on welfare, were the dominant but erroneous
notions about certain groups, their families, and the women who
seek public funds and services to support and maintain families.
The conservative ideology posits that these groups have no claim
to these resources because they do not conform to traditional
family values. Fueling this assumption is the false belief that
African American women dominate the welfare rolls. Similarly,
"negative images of Latinos and other immigrants fueled debates
in the states and paved the way for denying benefits to legal
immigrants nationwide" (Dill, Baca Zinn, and Patton, 1998: 21).
The conservative response, in short, is that the welfare state is
bad and should be eliminated. But just what is it that the policymakers are in the process of killing off? What will its death mean
for society? The U. S. welfare state, which is the most modest of the
industrialized nations, emerged in the 1930s as a reaction to the
instability of the Great Depression and capitalism run amuck
(the following is from Moberg, 1995). Motivated by a fear of
radical unrest by the economically disadvantaged and disaffected
and the need to save capitalism from its own self-destructive
tendencies (economic instability, rape of the environment, worker
exploitation, lack of worker and consumer safety), the creators
of the New Deal under Roosevelt and the Great Society under
Johnson instituted Social Security, the minimum wage, federal aid
to education, health and nutrition programs, subsidized housing,
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Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. These welfare
programs go too far, say the conservatives. Progressives, on the
other hand, argue that they do not go far enough.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE 1996 WELFARE
LEGISLATION FOR INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILIES
Although the time is relatively short since the 1996 welfare
legislation, we can examine some preliminary results and anticipate its longer term effects. As of September 1998, the welfare
rolls had declined from 12.2 million to about 8 million since the
enactment of the welfare legislation. This dramatic reduction has
led supporters of the new welfare law to declare that the new law
was working as intended. This interpretation is erroneous for at
least four reasons. To begin, those who left the welfare rolls first
were likely the easiest to place in jobs, that is, they have some
secondary education and job experience. But, while the bulk of
these former welfare recipients found work, their work, typically,
offered little room for advancement and a high risk of being laid
off (Burtless, 1998). Most important, the wages were usually too
meager to lift them out of poverty (Albelda, 1999). The Children's
Defense Fund and the National Coalition for the Homeless found
that for those who recently left welfare only 29 percent had wages
above the poverty line and 51 percent had wages that did not
even reach 75 percent of the poverty level (reported in Jackson,
1999). The much more difficult task will be to find jobs for those
who have multiple obstacles to success (relatively uneducated,
inadequate work experience or job skills, or who are functionally disabled). Second, the welfare legislation was passed at a
propitious historical moment-during an economic expansion
when jobs were being created and unemployment was low. Two
years later the unemployment rate had dropped to 4.3 percent, the
lowest rate in 27 years. Because of a growing economy the number
of AFDC recipients declined by 2.2 million in the 30 months before
the 1996 legislation(DeParle, 1997a; Wolf, 1998b).
But even with the booming economy and many still receiving
welfare because their time limits had not been reached, there are
reports of rising rates of hunger and homelessness (Population
Today, 1999). The U. S. Conference of Mayors collected data from
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61
30 major cities from November 1, 1997 to October 31, 1998 and
found that 78 percent of the cities had an increase in the number of
requests for emergency food assistance and 84 percent reported
an increase in the number of families with children who requested
emergency food assistance (United States Conference of Mayors,
1998). These requests were 16 percent higher than in the previous
year (the largest increase since 1992)(reported in Loven, 1998).
Another survey by Second Harvest, the nation's largest network
of food banks, found that more than 21 million people used
emergency food programs in 1997,40 percent of whom came from
working households (reported in Wolf, 1998a). Low-cost housing
has also become more scarce because of gentrification, soaring
housing prices, and the reduction in subsidized apartments. As
a result the Department of Housing and Urban Development
revealed that a record 5.3 million families with low incomes face a
crisis of unaffordable rent-defined as rents exceeding 30 percent
of one's income (Associated Press, 1998). The U. S. Conference on
Mayors reported that in 1998 there was an 11 percent increase in
emergency shelter demands over the previous year in the 30 cities
surveyed (reported in Ratnesar, 1999).
These realities raise serious questions about job availability,
hunger, and homelessness, when the unemployment rate goes
up to seven or eight percent, or worse, when there is an economic
recession. In either situation there will be layoffs, which means
that the last to be hired (the workers only recently off welfare) will
be the first to be fired. If these former employees had used up their
time limits for welfare, they will be on their own without a safety
net with nowhere to turn for rent, utilities, food, and health care.
Third, the availability of low end jobs is distributed unevenly.
Some social categories have more difficulty getting low-wage
employment than others. "Not surprisingly, in the fierce competition for jobs in that sector, individuals who are young, black and
non-college educated fare the worst" (Herbert, 1997: 70A). When
the unemployment rate was 5.2 percent in 1996, unemployment
among young African American women (ages 15 to 25 with a
high school diploma was 19.7 percent (Economic Policy Report,
cited in Herbert, 1997).
Work by itself is not the solution. Latino women and men
participate in the labor force at nearly the same rate as Whites
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Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
(66.5 percent compared to 67.2 percent (U. S. Department of
Labor, 1997), yet the poverty rate in 1996 for Latinos was 29.4
percent, compared to 11.2 percent for Whites (Dill et al., 1998).
Moreover, 10 percent of poor people worked year-round, fulltime in 1996. Underscoring one of the above points: working for
the minimum wage, which most former welfare recipients do,
gives a full-time worker an annual income that is more than $2000
below the poverty line for a family of three. Obviously, then, it
takes adequately compensated work to climb out of poverty, a
provision missing from the welfare legislation.
The 1996 legislation was especially harsh to immigrant families (Cherlin, 1998; Eisinger, 1998), who are mostly people of
color. New legal immigrants, except for those of refugee status,
are now ineligible for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families
(the mechanism that replaced AFDC), food stamps, and most
other federally funded benefits until they become citizens, which
takes a minimum of five years. Under these conditions, it seems
more than reasonable to assume that hundreds of thousands of
immigrant families will be pushed into poverty by the provisions
of the 1996 welfare legislation.
Regarding marriage Stephanie Aaronson and Heidi Hartmann conclude that the "preponderance of research suggests
that welfare has no impact on women's marital and childbearing
behavior. .."(Aaronson and Hartmann, 1996: 586). Poverty, on the
other hand, does. After reviewing the literature, family historian
Stephanie Coontz summarizes what previous research predicts:
Poor couples are twice as likely to divorce as more affluent ones.
Jobless individuals are three to four times less likely to marry. And
teens who live in areas of high unemployment and inferior school
systems are six to seven times more likely to become unwed parents
than more fortunate teens. Dozens of research studies show that the
most effective deterrent to early childbearing is access to, among
other things, good schools and steady jobs (Coontz, 1994: 19).
The recent welfare legislation is going to put more children
at risk as they and their mothers no longer receive AFDC, food
stamps, and other welfare benefits. Many of their mothers will
now work at minimum wage jobs with new expenses (transportation, child care, and clothing), and likely no health insurance.
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And, we know that many who work will not escape poverty.
Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty,
reported, for example, that in 1996 some 5.5 million children
lived in poverty and 63 percent of them lived in families with at
least one working parent (reported in Healy, 1998). Many of their
mothers are difficult to employ because they suffer disproportionately from mental health problems and they often lack quality
education and work experience. Thus, many former mothers on
welfare will likely be unemployed and without the safety net after
two years. Clearly, without raising the minimum wage, providing training programs, guaranteeing work, and subsidizing child
care, more children will be raised in poverty under the new welfare rules. Daniel Lichter's review of children in poverty shows
that before the 1996 welfare legislation went into effect, the rate of
child poverty was at a 30-year high, and the income gap between
rich and poor children greater than at any time in recent memory
(Lichter, 1997: 141). It is obvious that the new welfare legislation
will increase the child poverty rate and the income inequality
gap. The Urban Institute estimates that an additional 1.1 million
children would become poor as a result of the 1996 legislation
(The Urban Institute, 1996; see also Albelda and Tilly, 1997: 127).
Moreover, more than eight million families with children would
lose an average of $1,300 per family (cited in Edelman, 1997: 46)
Thus, more children than ever will be further impoverished,
which will have serious debilitating consequences for them (for
documentation of the later life outcomes of childhood poverty
see Duncan and Brooks-Gunn, 1997).
We ask: Is it appropriate to take $28 billion over six years in
food assistance from poor women and their children? As Marian
Wright Edelman has stated: "The elimination of the national
guarantee to protect children is a moral outrage ... a massive
betrayal that places the lives of many of our youngest and most
vulnerable citizens in grave danger" (Edelman, 1996: 1).
WHAT IS MISSING IN THE NEW WELFARE LEGISLATION
Foremost, the legislation ignored the conclusions of social
science research (Astone, 1997). This research documents, for
example, that 70 percent of ADFC recipients leave welfare within
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Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
two years. We also know that nearly three-fourths of those who
leave end up back on welfare because of inadequate pay, the lack
of medical benefits, or their lack of job skills. Only 15 percent of
recipients stay on welfare continuously for five years or more.
Social science research also informs us of the detrimental effects
of poverty on marriage relationships, the increased probability of
spouse and child abuse, and the dismal future for many children
of the poor.
Second, while focusing on the replacement of work for welfare, there is no provision for jobs and if one finds work there is no
assistance for transportation (two-thirds of all new jobs are in the
suburbs, while three-quarters of welfare recipients live in central
cities or rural areas; just one in 20 welfare recipients owns a car,
Bailey, 1997); and there is no child care subsidy or provision of
high level day care for the children of working parents. Moreover,
this law contains no provisions requiring the states to provide
educational or job-training programs for those displaced from
welfare. Especially hard hit are women. Without education:
women's wages will not grow, and without growth in their wages,
welfare mothers will never be able to afford child care or health
care.... Eliminating welfare without improving the pay and benefits of the jobs they can get-or improving their ability to get
better jobs-can have only one result: an increase in poverty among
women and children. (Harris, 1996: B7)
The 1996 welfare legislation assumes that jobs are uniformly
available. But the availability of low-wage, entry-level jobs depends on time and place. Some regions (e.g., the coal mining
region in Appalachia), states such as California and cities such as
New York City have to overcome a mismatch-huge numbers on
welfare and relatively few jobs. In New York City, for example,
the ratio of welfare recipients to jobs is four times the national
average. From 1992 to 1996 in that city there was a net gain of
only 88,000 jobs. "At that slow rate of growth, if every job gained
by the local economy were given to a New Yorker now on welfare
it would take 21 years for all 470,000 adults to be absorbed into
the economy" (Finder, 1996: 17). Similarly, by mid-1999 when
most welfare recipients will be forced to find some type of work,
Detroit expects a shortfall of 75,303 jobs and Philadelphia will
Safety Net
65
fall 53,400 jobs short (Associated Press, 1997). There are many
pockets of rural poverty where jobs are few and poverty high.
In East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, for example, 55 percent of the
residents live below the poverty line, the unemployment rate
is three times the national average, and the median household
income is less than one-third the median for the country. There is
no industry other than farming (Kelly, 1996). Nearby in the eleven
delta counties of Mississippi, the poverty rate is 41 percent and
unemployment more than double the national rate. Frank Howell
of Mississippi State University has estimated that for every 254
families leaving welfare in those counties only one new job will be
created (cited in DeParle, 1997). Or consider the case of California,
where the state's economy is generating 300,000 jobs a year (many
of which are high tech jobs not suitable for the underschooled
and undertrained), which is insufficient for the 1 million current
welfare recipients who have to be moved into a job market and
where 2 million people not on welfare are currently looking for
jobs and another half-million part-timers want more work (USA
Today, 1997).
A major concern with the welfare legislation is that by pushing
the poor into an already crowded workforce, wages for low-end
jobs will be driven down. This hurts those leaving welfare as
well as the working poor. There are 38 million working poor
who receive $7.50 or less an hour for work and usually have no
health insurance. What will happen to their wages and jobs when
4 million people (50 percent of all adults on welfare assistance)
are added to the workforce by 2000, as mandated by the law?
Employers are prohibited from firing existing workers to hire
welfare recipients whose compensation is subsidized by the state.
But employers can reduce working hours, wages, and benefits for
existing workers, a likely occurrence. The plight of the working
poor, always marginal, thus, becomes worse because of welfare
reform. Researchers at the Economic Policy Institute estimate
that with the addition of one million new low-wage workers the
income of the bottom 30 percent of earners will be reduced on
average by 11.9 percent. This drop in wages will be even more
severe in those states and localities with large numbers of people
on welfare (McCrate, 1997; Street, 1998). This has at least three
additional negative consequences. First, it weakens those labor
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Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
unions that organize low-pay workers such as janitors, municipal
workers, and food handlers. This weakness reinforces low wages
and minimal benefits for the economically marginal. Second, the
anger of the working poor, most likely, will be directed at the
former welfare recipients, not the economic system that limits
their opportunities and exploits them. Third, and related to the
second, the anger of the working poor will likely be overtly racist
as the working poor perceive their economic situation reduced
by racial minorities and immigrants who they believe are the
majority of welfare recipients (a belief that is false, by the way,
as 56 percent of first-time female-headed welfare recipients from
1990 to 1992 were White; Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law,
1996: 28).
The third missing ingredient in the new welfare legislation
is an understanding of the structural sources of poverty and
meeting the challenges of a rapidly changing economy.
Fourth, the legislation offers no safety net for the people who
are unable to find jobs or who are not able to get their children
into day care. When the economy slows down, as it inevitably
will, many of the working poor and former welfare recipients
will lose their jobs. What will happen to them when they cannot
pay their rents or house payments, or their utility bills, or medical
bills? Under the previous welfare system, many families were just
a lost job, divorce, medical disaster, or rent hike away from losing
their housing. The fastest growing category of homeless during
the late 1980s and early 1990s were families (Timmer, Eitzen, and
Talley, 1994). Under the new welfare law, and especially when
society experiences an economic downturn, increasing numbers
of families will have to move into substandard housing or even
into homeless shelters. According to Peter Edelman:
There will be suffering. Some of the damage will be obvious-more
homelessness, for example, with more demand on already strapped
shelters and soup kitchens. The ensuing problems will also appear
as increases in the incidence of other problems, directly but perhaps
not provably owing to the impact of the welfare bill. There will
be more malnutrition and more crime, increased infant mortality,
and increased drug and alcohol abuse. There will be increased
family violence and abuse against children and women, and a
consequent significant spillover of the problem into the already
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overloaded child-welfare system and battered-women's shelters.
(Edelman, 1997: 53)
To illustrate addressing just the issue of welfare's effect on crime
rates, Hannon and Defronzo (1998) found that higher levels of
welfare assistance reduce the strength of the positive relationship
between the size of the disadvantaged population and crime rates
(for the theoretical understanding of this effect see Messner and
Rosenfeld, 1997).
Fifth, a major concern with the 1996 welfare legislation is
the abdication of federal responsibility for welfare. By turning
over welfare to the states, there are fifty welfare programs. This
devolution has the effect of making benefits very uneven as some
states will be relatively generous and others will be much less so.
Tufts University's Center on Hunger and Poverty surveyed the
fifty states to study the implementation of federal welfare reform.
The study found that only fourteen states had revamped their
systems in such a way as to likely improve the financial condition
of the poor. Two-thirds of the states actually made changes that
threaten even greater poverty (reported in The Nation, 1998).
States' rights have not always worked in the past. "States failed in
the past to take the lead in trying to end racial discrimination or
to alleviate unemployment and poverty. That's why the country
need the New Deal, civil rights legislation, and social welfare
programs.. ." (Hettleman, 1997: 24; see also Schlesinger, quoted
in Shanker, 1995: E7).
Moreover, the federal block grants do not reflect economic
reality, since they do not adjust for inflation, for economic change,
or for demographics (Primus, 1997: 20). This oversight ensures
that the spending on poor people will not only vary by state but
that the amount will be increasingly inadequate.
Sixth, the welfare legislation does not protect children of
poor parents. How are they to escape poverty without adequate
supports for their health and education?
Seventh, the welfare legislation did not address the real issue
-ending poverty.
Many of us had assumed that welfare reform was fueled by a
desire to eliminate poverty. This is not the case. Under the new
law, welfare is seen as an issue in and of itself, divorced from issues
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Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
of poverty. Ending welfare had nothing to do with addressing poverty.
(Watts, 1997: 412)
THE SOLUTION
Is the answer to these poverty-related problems a more feeble welfare system or a more robust one? In our view the only
way to help poor people is to spend more money, not less as
the government has done since the Reagan administration (Wellstone and Dauster, 1999). This money would be spent on helping
people with child care, increasing the minimum wage, providing job training and education programs, universal health care
(at present we provide some health care for the poor through
Medicaid, but do not help the working poor-clearly, a perverse
incentive system), guaranteeing jobs, and reducing the tax burden
on the poor who are trying to work their way out of poverty. In
Wisconsin, for example, the welfare rolls have been cut by 65
percent over ten years. This effort to get people working rather
than on welfare has cost the state more, not less for health care,
child care, transportation, and training. In 1987, for instance,
Wisconsin spent $12 million a year on child care. By 1998, it was
spending $180 million annually (Dionne, 1997).
Is there a way to restructure the welfare system to apportion money and services more fairly to the needy? Is there a
way to move people away from welfare dependency and toward
autonomy, responsibility, and self-sufficiency? Is there a way to
strengthen families on the economic margins? Is there a way to
protect the children of the impoverished? Is there a way to meet
the needs of the working poor as well poor people? Is there a way
to structure such a federal program so that it attacks the causes of
poverty, not the symptoms? An editorial in In These Times provides
the progressive solution to these important questions:
Welfare as we know it should surely be ended. But it should be
ended in a way that provides every person capable of working with
an equal right to employment, and everyone who is employed with
a living wage. In the long run, that would also require equal educational opportunity for all at all levels of instruction, universal health
care and quality child care for working mothers. Such a program
should be federally mandated and funded, but administered by the
states or by elected community councils. And it should be available
69
Safety Net
to all citizens and legal residents up to a comfortable income level,
and paid for by graduated income taxes on those above that level.
(In These Times, 1996: 2; see also Edelman, 1997)
The current political climate (from both political parties and
much of the public) runs counter to these proposals. Instead of a
society that emphasizes community, cooperation, equality of opportunity, and fundamental human rights, the politico-economic
system of the United States celebrates individualism, competition, and domination. The vast majority of political leaders and
their constituents oppose increasing the minimum wage to a
living wage, universal health care, and an adequate safety net
for poor people. Thus, to eliminate poverty its roots in the market
economy must be eliminated.
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